Dreamways

Begging

"Fallen Pastor Seeks Aid to Pursue Studies“ read the headline of The New York Times article (26 Aug 07). This is followed by: "The Rev. Ted Haggard, who left the 10,000-member megachurch he founded after admitting to 'sexual immorality,‘ has asked supporters for financial help while he and his wife pursue studies in counseling and psychology. Mr. Haggard, the former pastor of New Life Church, plans to seeks a master’s degree in counseling at the University of Phoenix while his wife studies psychology, he said in an e-mail message sent this week to KRDO-TV in Colorado Springs.“  read more »

I wake each day to stretch across the threshold of sleep into the curtained morning light, searching for the wisps of dreams that have lately vanished with only the hint of a lingering scent, like a lover disappeared in the night. There are feeling tones that will sound through the day, triggered by a voice in the alley or a snippet of news on the radio. These cues keep the door ajar as I water the garden, sweep the walk, and close the house windows against the coming heat of August days in Denver. But the familiar substance of my dream world remains out of reach and out of sight.

As I was sitting in my local coffee shop working on this website, "In A Big Country", this surging and beautiful song about dreams, filled the air and my ears. Synchronicity: me and this song bumping into each other just as I was pondering the world of dreams. Synchronicity: me perceiving meaning in this coinciding of events. Synchronicity: an aspect of the Dreamfulness.  read more »

This 2006 U.S. film stars Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Queen Latifah. It is an intriguing movie, the plot line of which is very much like a dream.
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The collective American waking dream about Paris Hilton suffuses the air we all breathe. P. Hilton as a media darling is a vapid dream at best, a tawdry nightmare at worst. She is the topic of a recent Doonesbury cartoon (Garry Trudeau, Sunday, 05 Aug 07).

In the kitchen, bespectacled, middle-aged Mike, questions Alex: “That isn’t what I think it is, is it Alex?”

"Who's Minding the Mind? The subconscious brain is more active, independent and purposeful than once thought. Sometimes it takes charge.“ (Benedict Carey, The New York Times, 31 Jul 07)

In his novel, Atonement (2002. Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, New York), Ian McEwan writes about the power of daydreams. "The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back. Come back, her sister used to whisper when she woke her from a bad dream.  read more »

The Sandman: Season of Mists (vol. 4):. Neil Gaiman. (1992). New York: DC Comics. If the previous volume in the Sandman series is more like a collection of short stories, disjointed dreams, the fourth volume is more of a novella, a long dream. This volume paints literally one Hell of a tale, an Infernal picture. The plot interweaves two threads of action, each having to do with the state of Hell. One thread depicts Morpheus / Dream’s journey to Hell, where he ventures in order to clean up some ancient, unsavory, unfinished business.  read more »

Padlock & Chain of Love

"Love, in all its splendor and mess, found a fit expression on Rome’s oldest bridge last year. Inspired by a best-selling book, then the movie version, young couples wrote their names on a padlock. They chained their lock around lampposts on Ponte Milvio. Then they symbolically cut off escape by tossing the keys into the wine-dark Tiber below." So begins Ian Fisher's article "Love Rite on a Bridge, but Is the Romance Fading?" in The New York Times (06 Aug 07).
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The fellow referred to in the title of Alex Witchel’s article "Mr. Wicked“ (The New York Times Magazine, 11 Mar 07) is author Gregory Maguire, best known for the immensely popular novel Wicked and the equally popular musical spun off from it. The article looks at how the themes in Mr. Maguire’s writing reflect the major themes of his life, which have strong elements of the realm of fairy tales. And the world of fairy tales is also the world of dreams.
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